Social Media Management in the Russian State-Affiliated News Agencies: A Scoping Review

Russian state-affiliated news agencies play a particular role in how the interaction between the state, the media system, and the audiences is constructed. In recent years, information agencies, just as other media, have introduced social media management (SMM), including news publishing on social media. This, along with web 1.0 news publishing, contributes to a “B2C turn” of news agencies in terms of news production and dissemination. This also changes the role of information agencies in the public sphere; their roles shift from being primary news producers and gatekeepers into the roles similar to other media, thus making them take part into more intense market competition. However, for the state-owned information agencies which also perform the task of promoting the state-approved slant on events, the growing competition creates a clash of interests (commercial vs. political) which inevitably affects their SMM strategies—and this remains virtually unstudied. Our scoping review is dedicated to SMM strategies of state-affiliated information agencies in Russia, as assessed by the current media studies. A total of 12,800 academic papers on the use of social media by news agencies were identified, of which very few were on Russia. Of these few, only 23 met the criteria for inclusion in the review. We show that most papers deal with the agencies’ SMM without putting it into normative perspectives and define a large gap between the Western and Russian research on news agencies’ SMM, indicative of polarization within media studies.